The dizzying, mesmerizing Trump show

In nearly 90 rambling minutes in the East Room of the White House on Thursday, Donald Trump distilled the breakneck first month of his presidency into a dizzying microcosm of political performance art. In the process, he demolished any lingering doubt about whether he’d bend the presidency to his will, or vice versa.

He dissembled, claiming he’d won the largest Electoral College victory since Ronald Reagan, and when a reporter pointed out the inaccuracy of the claim, breezed on, “Well, I don’t know, I was given that information.”

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He denounced, attacking a press whose “level of dishonesty is out of control.” He charmed, and condescended, praising April Ryan, the White House correspondent of American Urban Radio Networks, who is African-American, for a “very professional and very good” question about inner cities, and asking if she could arrange a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus.

He spluttered, dismissing questions about his campaign’s contact with Russian intelligence officials with an airy, alliterative wave, “Russia is a ruse.”

And he made at least one bold, ironclad claim that seems incontrovertible: “I don’t think there’s ever been a president elected who in this short period of time has done what we’ve done.”

Indeed, the first four weeks of the Trump administration have sent the Washington political and media establishment off on a bender seldom, if ever, seen in American history. The new president has now made clear that any effort at rehabilitation — which, in one sense, his rollicking news conference surely was — will be handled strictly on his own terms.

There was a time in American politics — and not so long ago — when a presidential encounter like Trump’s with the White House press corps would have been dissected for days, if not years, for its shimmering accumulation of id, ego, grievance and self-pity (“I’m really not a bad person, by the way,” he insisted at one point), and might even have prompted a close reading of the 25th Amendment’s provisions on presidential disability.

After all, Trump made a breathtaking batch of demonstrably false claims, and gave full voice to the kinds of resentments that the most press-sensitive of modern presidents — Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton — only unevenly voiced in public, usually at their peril.

But he did so with a kind of gleeful abandon, even a sly playfulness at times (“Now, that’s what I call a nice question,” he said when someone asked a softball about his wife, Melania) that suggested he himself was in on the act. The sheer concentration of the performance not only probably played well with his core supporters, but seemed just another iteration of the new normal that is Trump’s Washington.

Trump has set a land-speed record for creation of turmoil in the White House, the capital and the wider world. In his hyper-paced universe, every hour feels like a day, every day like a week, every week like a month. And you can be sure that by tomorrow, we’ll all be on to something else.

Rocky transitions are far from unheard of. James Buchanan’s was a doozy: In short order, he pre-emptively endorsed the Supreme Court’s pending Dred Scott decision finding blacks had no right of personhood; appointed an all-Southern cabinet that scotched any hope of support from Northern Democrats; and sparked the financial panic of 1857.

Eleven days into Bill Clinton’s first term in 1993, The Washington Post reported that old hands were complaining that his White House was “incredibly inept” with the “common sense of a goat,” and his first two nominees for attorney general withdrew because they had employed illegal aliens as household help. It took until June for a Time magazine cover story to call Clinton, “The Incredible Shrinking President,” and for Newsweek to ask, “What’s Wrong?”

He has sparked global chaos with a ban on travel to the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries and fired his acting attorney general for refusing to defend it. He has fixated on the size of his inaugural crowds; floated baseless claims that millions of illegal voters let Hillary Clinton win the popular vote; launched Twitter fusillades against the federal judiciary, the city of Chicago, Senator John McCain, Nordstrom, the media and “low-life leakers” in his own government.

He has hung up on the Australian prime minister, canceled a summit with the Mexican president and complained to the French president that Washington is being shaken down by entities as varied as China and NATO. Even Trump’s official proclamation on the occasion of his own inauguration, declaring it a “National Day of Patriotic Devotion,” abandoned the note of humility and reconciliation that had prevailed since George H.W. Bush began the tradition in 1989.

“This is the worst start to a presidency in modern times,” said the historian Robert Dallek.

Antony Blinken, the former deputy secretary of state in Barack Obama’s second term, put it a bit differently: “I thought the presidency was supposed to exhaust the president, not the American people,” he said.

But even when the normal institutional forces of gravity bring Trump up short — the courts block his travel ban; his national security adviser resigns for lying to the vice president about a pre-inaugural talk with the Russian ambassador; his nominee for labor secretary withdraws over controversies about his business practices and personal behavior — he presses ahead, defying conventional political physics on matters within his sole purview. With a stroke, he drops his country’s decades-long stance on a two state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute; renews his war with the American intelligence establishment and, according to The New York Times, plans an independent review of its operations. And just to cap his rockiest week yet, he’s headed to a campaign-style rally with the faithful in Florida.

For the new president and his allies, the shattering of convention is precisely the point. That’s the precise inverse of most previous transitions, when the imperatives and customs of the office upended novice incumbents, brought them to heel and forced them to change their ways. Trump’s determination to shape the institution of the presidency in his own image remains unflagging.

“It is the natural state of the Trump clique to create turbulence like this, and when you have a White House staff that is long on incompetence and sycophancy and short on people trained as grownups, it can go on for a while,” said the veteran Republican consultant Mike Murphy, who ran Jeb Bush’s campaign super-PAC. “It’s totally uncharted territory. What we have is the incompetence of the Carter White house magnified, and the paranoia and loyalty fetish of the second term of the Nixon White House, combined and transmitted in real time through digital media. There are a few things that look historically familiar, but it’s all happening on steroids.”

Just how long Trump can sustain the current pace is another question. Some of his own supporters have taken to Twitter to remind the president that not every passing thought needs expressing. “I voted for you but this is embarrassing,” one of them, Stephen Ross, wrote last week after Trump attacked Nordstrom for dropping his daughter Ivanka’s fashion line. “How do you have time to worry about this and not our country?” The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, told The Wall Street Journal, “It would be, I think, easier for us to succeed were there fewer daily tweets.”

Indeed, Trump’s preferred method of direct communication with the public — Twitter — has already become so numbingly familiar that it is easy to forget just how novel it is. He is far from the first president to be a world-class whiner. But imagine if Johnson, instead of threatening an adversary in telephone conversations that only he knew were being secretly recorded, had broadcast his complaints on live television. Or if Clinton, instead of hollering at his long-suffering aide George Stephanopoulos in private, had sent a fiery blast-fax to every media outlet in the world.

Clinton’s adventures in avoiding traditional media filters — playing his saxophone on the Arsenio Hall show, confessing his underwear preferences on MTV — were semi-scandalous 25 years ago, but they look as quaint as an old lace valentine today.

For his part, Trump promised the swift issuance of a new executive order on travel (and a continuing legal appeal of the old one) and action next month on overhauling the health insurance system and cutting taxes. But at the moment, his ambitious agenda is stalled on Capitol Hill, a victim of White House infighting, empty sub-Cabinet positions and mixed signals from the president himself. If weeks turn to months without concrete action on those campaign promises, Trump might pine for his current troubles.

But on Thursday, the president sounded as brassily confident as Candide.

“We’re going to take care of it all,” Trump insisted at the outset of his appearance. “I just want you to know I inherited a mess.”